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Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, and Monsters is the art-and-making-of book for the film.

It's a great book. Big, hardcover, 156-pages. There are additional sticked on materials on the pages, stickers and two big posters.

The book is packed with amazing content. There are lots of concept art, set photography and lengthy writeup on the production. Everything's beautifully laid out.

The concept art consist of the characters, Jaeger robots, Kaiju monsters and film scenes. The bulk of the art, more than half the book, is on the Jaegers and Kaijus. The development art are just awesome. They are very detailed. There are Jaegers with their front and back with closeups to their heads, battle damaged versions, 3D wireframes, 3D gray models and some discarded concepts.

Kaijus are crustacean-lizards-insect inspired. The designs look great, menacing, and dangerous. The texture work is really well done. The sculpted maquettes look terrific. There are twelve Kaijus if I counted correctly. Guillermo Del Toro has his unique sense of art direction. It's clear he likes monsters very much. Kudos to Hugo Martin, Alex Jaeger, Francisco Ruiz Velasco and other artists on the designs also.

The set designs are illustrated with mainly photographs and art. Again, they are very detailed and there's a strong sense of worn and tattered feel to most places.

The commentary is excellent. There's plenty to read about the characters, the designs of the Jaegers and Kaijus, and many stories on the production process.

This is a fantastic art and companion book to the movie. One of my 2013 favorites.

Highly recommended.

There are two publishers for the book, Insight Editions and Titan Books. Those in USA should get the one from Insight Editions.

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